“Like you?” The nymph smiled saucily, and the tip of a startling blue tongue appeared for an instant between her rather sharp-looking front teeth. “Oh, no. Not like you. None so cursed!”

At that moment Quentin felt his telekinetic spell cease to exist. She’d abolished it, though he didn’t catch how, without a word or a gesture. In the same instant the naiad flipped head down and dived, her pale periwinkle buttocks flashing in the air, and vanished into dark water that looked too shallow to contain her.

Her head poked up again a moment later.

“I fear for you here, human children. This is not your war.”

“We’re not children,” Janet said.

“What war?” Quentin called.

She smiled again. Between her lavender lips her teeth were pointy and interlocking like a fighting fish’s. She held something dripping in her webbed fist.

“A gift from the river. Use it when all hope is lost.”

She tossed it at them overhand. Quentin caught it one-handed; he was relieved out of all proportion to its actual importance that he didn’t bobble it. Thank God for his old juggling reflexes. When he looked up again, the nymph was gone. They were alone with the chattering brook.

Quentin was holding a small ivory horn chased with silver.

“Oh-kay!” Josh shouted. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “We are definitely not in Kansas anymore!”

The others gathered around to look at the horn. Quentin handed it to Eliot, who turned it over a few times, peered into one end, then the other.

“I don’t feel anything on it at all,” Eliot said. “Looks like something you’d buy in an airport gift shop.”

“You wouldn’t necessarily feel it,” Penny said proprietarily. He took it and stowed the horn in his pack.

“We should have asked her if this is Fillory,” Alice said quietly.

“Of course it’s Fillory,” Penny said.

“I’d like to be sure. And I’d like to know why we’re cursed.”

“And what’s this war?” Richard asked, his heavy brows knotted. “This raises a lot of questions.”

“And I didn’t like those teeth,” Alice added.

“Jesus,” Josh said. “Jesus! That was a naiad, people! We just saw a river nymph! How cool is that? How cool are we? Huh? Fuckin’ Fillory, people!”

He grabbed Quentin’s shoulders and shook him. He ran at Richard and made him bump chests.

“Can I just say that she was pretty hot?” said Janet.

“Shyeah! I’ll take that over a faun any day,” Josh said. Anaïs swatted him.

“Hey, that’s Penny’s girlfriend you’re talking about,” Janet said. “Show some respect.”